Wednesday, September 17, 2003

For knitters, I've got new pics up of koolaid-dyed wool and some new knitting projects. For WebDAV afficionados, I just uploaded pictures from this weeks' interop event at UCSC. For everybody else, let's see... here's something. The Verisign move to direct you to advertising pages for unregistered domain names is causing a bit of a furor. Some random guy (a Melbourne IT consultant) said in response:

It's certainly a very self-serving move, and a body such as VeriSign should have followed the accepted process for peer-review, perhaps in conjunction with an IETF working group.

Yeah, I don't think so. The IETF is a technical body and very poor at non-technical decision making. We have a hard enough problem doing IM protocols and getting AOL to participate -- even harder to do political/commercial work and get Verisign to participate. Any other suggestions, or does international society just not have a way to deal with this? I guess under US law it might be anti-competitive. However, there are completely non-legislative, non-discussion-based and yet still consensus-oriented ways to deal with this. A smarter sysadmin said

Developers were likely to respond by patching the software for DNS services ... so that false results pointing at VeriSign's servers were discarded.